


And by a Sleep We Hope to End the Heartache

by snowbellewells



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 11:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19150435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowbellewells/pseuds/snowbellewells
Summary: (This story was originally written for the second edition of the CS Storybook on Tumblr – go check that out if you haven’t, it’s amazing!!  My episode for that project was 5x04 “Broken Kingdom”, and within that framework, I wanted to imagine how Killian might have tried to help comfort a sleepless Emma as she fought the darkness within.  Hope you enjoy!  I’d love – as always – to hear what you think!)





	And by a Sleep We Hope to End the Heartache

**Author's Note:**

> (This story was originally written for the second edition of the CS Storybook on Tumblr – go check that out if you haven’t, it’s amazing!! My episode for that project was 5x04 “Broken Kingdom”, and within that framework, I wanted to imagine how Killian might have tried to help comfort a sleepless Emma as she fought the darkness within. Hope you enjoy! I’d love – as always – to hear what you think!)

“Lass…Emma… Love, please, you have to stop…” his quiet voice, vibrating with emotion despite its soothing timbre, still somehow managed to slice through the paranoia, the swirling images, and yammering voices roiling inside her skull. It was the one thing, other than her son’s hopeful, trusting face, which had managed to do so since she had risen from the ominous hatch in the Camelot forest, alone, confused, and the newest Dark One. Her stride faltered at his plea, her step finally pausing before the window of the castle suite they had been given by Arthur for their accommodation.

Looking over her shoulder to find his fraught gaze, Emma turned slightly toward the pirate, a glance half exasperation and half desperate need on her conflicted face. “What do you want from me, Killian?” she whispered tiredly, her shoulders slumping with a weary defeat he had rarely seen from her. He had no way of knowing that Emma desired nothing so much as to cross the large open chamber and collapse into his arms, as she had a week ago when they’d first found her in the stone circle about to crush Merida’s heart. His embrace tight around her, his heart beating frantically just under her palm, those few moments had been the only time the riot inside her head had seemed to cease – when she could think clearly, as only herself. She needed that relief again, and yet she feared letting down her guard, even for a moment’s comfort. She was barely keeping all the violent, persuasive urges twining through her consciousness at bay, barely keeping all the raw power tingling under her skin from breaking free. She could not allow herself the peace of Killian’s embrace; rest might let the horrors loose upon them all. 

Her pirate watched her knowingly, his eyes gentle, yet seeing and understanding too much as his discerning gaze studied her from across the room. Those blue pools of his stare took in the way she vibrated slightly, no matter how she tried to hold still. He saw the tangled, disheveled fall of her hair – usually more a silky sheet of gold – the strange, rough grey duster she wore, still trailing dirt and dried leaves from the forest floor behind her. This was his Swan before him yet, but she was in distress and guarded once more, in a way she had finally begun to put in her past – and he experienced a disorienting, long rush of despair at how to help her. He only knew for certain that he must find a way.

“Come here, Lass,” he finally murmured, half a directive and half an appeal, as he held out his hand to her from where he sat at the edge of the room’s large canopy bed. 

“Why?” she fired back nervously. “I’m the Dark One now. I don’t sleep, remember?”

The unhinged tone in her voice, as well as the unvarnished bitterness, worried him more than he cared to admit. Killian hesitated, biting his lip and considering his next words carefully. His pause only seemed to agitate her further. Why indeed? And yet, he could not help but want her near, wish to gather her to his side, run the curve of his hook down her spine, and attempt to soothe her, bring her some measure of comfort, however ineffectual it might prove in the end.

Heaving a deep sigh, Killian forced his voice to remain slow and even, despite his frustration and his utter anger at the situation his Love had been cast into. Crooking his fingers in invitation, beckoning her forward while keeping his hand extended to her palm up, he raised an eyebrow slightly in challenge. “Nor am I trying to force you to, Emma. I have not forgotten what you are battling, but can I not try to aid you in the fight? Can I not hold the woman I love for a few moments?”

Her lower lip trembled in response, before she pressed her mouth tightly closed, considering his offer, the longing clear on her face, until she let her swirling green eyes meet his at last. “Y-you still…you still see me?” she finally whispered, her voice desperately fearful, quivering at the end with hope.

There was no need for flowery words, only to hold her gaze, give a decided, affirmative nod and answer, “Aye.”

At that single word, Emma took one hesitant, faltering step toward him, then another, until he could clasp her hand in his questing fingers and pull her against him, sitting at the edge of the rich, overlarge bed. Mumbling quiet nonsense, Killian tucked Emma under his chin, cradling the back of her head in his palm and rocking them gently from side to side. “Shh, Love, shh… it’s going to be alright,” he crooned, injecting steadfast certainty he wished he truly felt into his tone.

Emma’s voice was broken and child-like as she spoke, her words muffled slightly by the leather of his sleeve. “How can it be?” she asked plaintively. There was something achingly human about her now, when before she had seemed so steely and impervious – untouchable as she stood at the window like a sentry, proud and strong, but cold and hard as well, looking out over the courtyard into the dark night. The power within her was a distancing shield, a barrier higher and more impenetrable than her emotional walls had ever been. Pulling back again briefly to look into the limitless eyes of this man who had pulled her back from the brink, her face was flushed and wet with silently shed tears, as real and vulnerable as he had ever seen her. “I’m hanging by a thread, Killian. There’s so much pressing inside, trying to escape, and the voices, the Dark Ones before me, they’re constantly whispering, watching, tempting me and trying to take over. If I let my guard slip, if they get loose… I’m terrified of what might happen, what I might do… who I might hurt…” The last words dropped to the barest whisper, her eyes falling to their intertwined fingers anxiously, unable to see the disgust and disapproval that must surely be on the face that had always before been nothing short of adoring.

However, what she found when she looked up was far from devastating – so tender it made her very pulse still, bringing her up short and blinking in disbelief. “That will never happen, Emma. I know it with every fiber of my being, as surely as I know the way around my ship and as clearly as the navigator’s course is marked by the stars in the sky. You are stronger than that demon, Love. Though I hate that you must fight so bitterly, I have no doubt that you will win.”  
“Thank you for believing in me, Killian,” she bit her lip, the lower one caught by her teeth, and she continued to play with her fingers, again avoiding his eyes to stare at their joined hands. “But I can’t help worrying. You can’t know that for sure! When you found me yesterday evening, trying to take the dagger from Regina’s hiding place, I nearly took your head off! It was your quick reflexes that saved you, not any restraint of mine. I wasn’t in my right mind at all. Wh- what if you had been killed? What if you had been Henry? Or my mom with my little brother?”

Killian sighed, giving a moment for Emma to feel her words had sunk in, gathering her closer still against his chest and pressing his lips to the soft hair at the crown of her head, humming gently against her skin, hoping to quiet her anxious quaking in his arms. When he did speak at last, his voice was low, a mere warm undertone at her ear. “Swan, you have already fought back since then. Think of our ride this afternoon, and that moment of perfection in the Middlemist field. The Crocodile’s vile echo, any of the others, they were not present then, were they? Those insidious voices vanished, aye? Do not grant them a way back in.”

Emma nodded weakly, burying her adorably perfect little nose into his thickly furred chest, as if it were the softest pillow she had ever rested against. Killian had never seen her so fragile – his angel of boots and leather and steely resolve – and though his heart swelled that she would finally turn to him in her need – he hated the burden she bore. It was too much, too much to ask of a woman who had been so strong and carried such hurt all her life. A little sigh escaped her rosebud lips, the breathe tickling his collarbone, and Killian felt a rush of tension and wild energy drain from her, her shoulders slumping and her slight form leaning against him more heavily for support.

“So, do you think you can allow yourself a bit of peace?” he asked, smoothing mussed strands of her hair back over her shoulder affectionately, just as he had done almost since their first meeting.

Emma only muttered unintelligibly against him at first, before she finally put enough distance between them for him to make out her husky voice. “I’ll lie down with you and try to rest a bit. You still need to sleep, Pirate. But I won’t…it won’t work…I’ve figured that out by now. It’s just the way it is…”

“Fair enough then, Swan. I will make do with what I can get,” he assured her, offering a crooked half-smile and scooting back toward the pillows piled at the head of the bed while still keeping her in his embrace.

She made no effort to distance herself, moving with him and placing her hand over his heart near her flushed cheek as he settled comfortably on the mattress, looking up at the high, stone ceiling above them. His one hand began to trace idle patterns on her shoulder and arm as they cuddled together, neither drifting into sleep yet, but perhaps finding a bit of respite all the same.   
Eventually, when Killian did find his eyes fluttering closed, he began to speak, softly and almost without thought. He would not leave her alone in her struggle, and so he began to fill the void with words to keep himself awake and with her. To his own astonishment, what came to his lips were tales he had long forgotten until that moment, memories from when he was but a lad long ago, which no other person had heard – not even Milah or Bae – until that moment. And he was grateful then for Emma’s warmth and full attention as he spoke, emotions that had needed vent for centuries were now finally loosed – all the pain and rejection of being left alone and afraid in the dark, a child who had started out on an adventure with his papa and instead been thrown rudderless into the heaving waves of a cruel and treacherous adult world. 

His voice dwelt haltingly on his one light – both his anchor and his compass – his Liam. Once begun, the story of their stolen boyhood streamed from him, the bits and pieces of the beloved older brother who had been his companion and the only family left to him, in a harsh, dark world of slavery and bleak deprivation. Liam, who had told him stories when he couldn’t sleep for the suffocating pitch blackness of the hold where they were sometimes locked at night merely for the sake of the other crew’s entertainment or for some imagined mistake, the growing young man who had given half his rations to his gangly younger brother whose belly never felt properly full, who had found a way to splint Killian’s ankle when the sadistic bosun on their master’s ship had yanked and twisted it to keep Killian from scaling the ropes to the crow’s nest where he could hide from the hulking man’s mistreatment, the protective father figure who had curled around his sibling offering body heat when they both shivered in their bunk, one threadbare blanket between them on winter nights at sea, and his hero who had given Killian the one gleam of hope he had possessed in those endless suffering years. It had all been pent inside him for so long that once he began to speak of Liam, Killian couldn’t bring himself to stop until it was all voiced. Liam Jones had been taken from the world much too soon, and Killian had not allowed himself to grieve – taken to piracy and retribution, plunging headlong down the ages - until that moment in Arthur’s kingdom with his silently listening True Love.

His deluge of words did not seem to faze Emma; in fact, she appeared to welcome his outpouring, tracing gentle fingertips over the contours of his face and into his hair, the strokes as soothing as his touch had been to her a short time ago. Killian didn’t know how long he talked and Emma listened attentively, but his eyelids at last drooped closed in the still watches of the night, his voice slowing and tripping sluggishly, exhaustion and flagging adrenaline towing him under until he could not fight sleep any longer. He thought he saw Emma’s hand wave over him, but then he was lost in slumber. 

~~~88~~~

When he woke with the next day’s dawn, the spot where she had rested beside him was still warm, but Emma was no longer there.

~~~88~~~

They set up a reassuring pattern after that. Night after night, for as long as they were guests in the castle of Camelot, Killian could at least coax Emma to lie down in the circle of his arms and rest her weary body, if not her mind in actual sleep. It was better than nothing, and the pirate strove with all he had to stay awake with her, to keep vigil at her side through the lonely grey hours, when she was most vulnerable and her strength might flag. Exhausted though they both were, it could have been so much worse, and Killian was grateful for what she did allow him to do. The first time he had fallen into slumber and woken with her gone, his heart had been in his throat, fearful for where she might have gone and what horror could have gripped her and spurred her from their resting place. However, when he found her where they all convened for breakfast, a tiny, almost light, smile curved her lips upward at the corners when she spied him. Something in her face let him know that she appreciated what he had shared, that he had allowed her to comfort him, and that somehow in granting her that caring gesture, he had made her feel more human once again, given her back a bit of herself.

Those sleepless nights in the broken kingdom of legend’s Once and Future King, when Emma curled into his side and he finally felt the shaking ease from the taut muscles she had held under rigid control all that day, more terrified with each passing one that she might slip and do some terrible magic she couldn’t take back, and he sensed more than heard her say that the hissing demons in her mind had ceased their torment for a while – those nights were when their fragile love, born in Storybrooke over moonlit walks, pizza with Netflix, and interrupted coffee dates, took root and grew into something dauntless, lasting, and True. From those nights he held her until his body gave up and forced him to sleep, or they both stayed awake and saw the morning paint the sky together, from then on Captain Hook and his Swan savior were joined in a bond which could not be severed by distance or foe, the Darkness or even Fate.

Once they left the land of Avalon, there was further pain and trial. The fatal cut from Excalibur would have been Killian’s death; he had been resigned to it, had lived much longer than he’d ever been meant to and begged Emma to let him go. But the threat of losing her pirate – her reason to finally open her heart again and let herself fully live – caused Emma to make a tragic mistake. The temptation that had finally broken her resistance and blackened her soul after all her desperate struggle and restraint was bending the laws of nature to keep him alive and at her side. His angel fell to the need to save him, to not lose one more person who loved her and allowed her to love – to feel – in return. And when she crumbled, it drug him into the pit along with her. Harsh words and rage, bitten into blades that wounded and scarred, passed between the True Loves who then shared the worst Darkness the realms had ever known.

Yet, after the torture, the fire, and one more crippling separation, they found the way back to each other. Exhausted, battered, but hand-in-hand, after traveling to the very Underworld itself and defying the lord of that domain, in the end even death could not part the Savior and her captain forever. When they finally stole a moment upon their return – tripping tangled together up the front steps of the house that Killian and Henry had chosen by the dim light of the stars on a chilly May night in Storybrooke, Emma was so sleepy she was nearly punch drunk in her pirate’s grasp as he barely managed to catch her before she fell onto the wooden porch. Both of them were chuckling lightly, blearily only half awake, but so glad to be alone together and safe, at least for a moment, that anything else could wait. It had been a long time coming, and the austere hall and front room were somewhat haunted yet by their distorted alters’ presences and the barbs they had thrown, but they bypassed that silent space – it would keep for the morrow – to finally enter the bedroom they had always meant to share.

The peace which washed over Emma in that moment they fell together, sinking into the thick, cushy comforter, navy blue dotted by tiny white anchors she had chosen with him in mind, and the joy she felt at the sleep-muted delight on his face on first glimpse of them, was the most comfort she had felt since he stole her away on horseback that afternoon in Camelot. It seemed lifetimes ago now, though she could still feel the pink petals of the Middlemist flower he had handed her in that green haven and the sun slanting down on their faces as they had kissed.

She realized then that though there was healing still to be done, they had once more reached the place of hope they had found amidst the dazzling field of blooms and golden light. There was the promise of forever in that hazy remembered moment, with the white dress and cape, the wind in her hair, the kiss that had swept her up in delight. Though the sky had been their only witness, Emma had felt her heart blend irrevocably with his in that moment, and there in their home by the sea, weeks or months later, so jarring and confused she hardly knew which, as he pulled the sheet and blankets up to her chin before huddling beneath them with her and hoping to banish the world outside, it felt as if they were finally going to enjoy the vow that had been made between them in that fairytale scene rose-tinted in her mind’s eye. With Killian at her back, arms wrapped around her so that hand and hook could rest upon her skin, and his nose nuzzled warmly at the nape of her neck, at long last Emma finally slept.


End file.
